Abstract

The goal of this article is to advocate the inclusion of Adam Smith among the Great Minds of Regional Science. The challenge was high. We can now backdate many concepts we normally use in Regional Science, find the first analytical interpretation of urban land rent and the intuition of the cognitive role of the large city, get a consistent rationale for (urban) land «peculiar» taxation, shared by all subsequent classical economists up to Marshall and Pigou. But Smith’s major legacy lies in the methodology: he merges economic analysis, history, political science and class struggles, role of institutions, psychology and moral in human behavior. All this allows him to open new promising avenues to today’s analysis of the role of power in income distribution between the large city and the rest of territory; to anticipate Marx’s theory of labor alienation; to introduce civicness, relationality and reciprocity as elements that improve not just opulence but public wellbeing. All this points out how many modern theoretical developments in economics could have been achieved much earlier, had Smith’s legacy not been misunderstood for so long time.